Monday, December 8, 2008

This should make you cringe...

Sunday, December 7, 2008

What about the individual?

I saw this article a few weeks back about US Major League Baseball teams violating a previous agreement and recruiting Japanese baseball amateurs. The whole article is about the dispute between Japanese baseball officials and MLB officials, and the viability of Japanese baseball. Somehow the article's 1300-odd words managed to avoid any mention of what was best for the players in question. If a Japanese player wants to play in the United States, who are Japan's baseball leagues to stop him? What business is it of theirs? They have a concern about their baseball leagues. Fine. Whatever. Do what you will to keep it alive. But to restrict the freedom of a Japanese citizen? To keep him from finding the best place for him to offer his services? You can't justify taking away the choices of a real person for some nebulous and not particularly important concept like "Japanese baseball." That's just not right.

Friday, December 5, 2008

On the automaker bailout

Save the workers, let the companies die. If people are going to be hurt by the demise of the automakers, help the hurt, don't put the companies on life support. Seems pretty simple to me. Oh, right. Politics.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Blog levels

Software programs often have features for describing what they're doing. The usual term is log. Log messages are generally categorized by what part of the program is writing them. Usually there will also be a time and date. One of the key parts of a logging system is the idea of a log level. That's an indicator of how important the message is. Common log levels might include DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and FATAL. You can tell the program to tell you everything, or to just tell you stuff that's really important. You set a minimum threshold of importance, and then it just reports stuff that's at least that important.

I'm starting to think I want blog levels. Maybe the levels I'd have would be TRIVIAL, SMALL, MEDIUM, BIG, and HUGE. This post would probably be a SMALL. A mildly amusing picture, like the Amazon oops, that would be TRIVIAL. Changing jobs? BIG. New baby? HUGE. And so forth.

You are apparently interested in me. I don't question that; I'm kind of afraid of the answer. Nevertheless, you're probably not interested in every stray thought that crosses my head. You probably don't want to run this weblog on TRIVIAL. I've already got categories. Those aren't quite right, though. You can select the posts in a category, or you can see everything. But there's no way to say "only show things more important than MEDIUM." It's nothing or one or all. So yeah. Blog levels. I want them.